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Musical March Madness: Championship Matchup

The final two. First, there were 64, and we’ve cut in half until now, the last matchup. There have been upsets, domination, and polarizing matchups. Lets see how they got here:

Les Miserables has dominated in each matchup so far. It started off strong, beating She Loves Me 33-4. It moved on to face The Music Man, and ended its run, winning 17-3. Next was West Side Story, and in this highly touted matchup, Les Miserables cruised past 14-7. It faced the #15 seeded Light in the Piazza in the Elite 8, easily taking it 27-6. In the Final Four, Les Miserables jumped into the final, moving past Rent, 26-18.

On the other side of the bracket, the winner is….Wicked! It’s path to the final was much more dramatic than Les Miserables. In the first round, it beat Tommy, 19-9. Moving into the second round, it went up against a strong Avenue Q, still winning 15-4. Next was Spamalot, who put up a good fight, but ultimately lost by one, 11-10. In the Elite 8, Wicked took care of Sweeney Todd convincingly, 24-9, moving onto the Final Four, facing Hairspray. This one was close, but when I closed the voting, Wicked was winning by one vote again, this time 21-20.

I will say this: I’ve gotten a lot of messages (and even in person) where people have said they don’t agree with what’s happened. That is the beauty of it.

I tried to make the matchups objective, by ranking them by the length of their Broadway run. Naturally, some were left out, and others were ranked unfairly (Singing in the Rain, West Side Story) because of the length of the original run.

It was a fun bracket to see what is popular in the here and now. This champion will be decided by who voted, and everyone gets one vote. This might not be your champion, and it might not be your final two, but we’ve gotten here based on votes of the people and nothing else. Make a bracket for yourself and see who wins yours!

It would be interesting to see this bracket in it’s entirety when voted on by a larger sample size. The most votes we had on one matchup was this last round, when the Les Miserables and Rent matchup gathered 44 votes. Not entirely representative.

It’s enough to get a general idea, but of course, all democratic voting is flawed if not all opinionated parties are voting. This was for fun; it might not be what you expected, but that was the point.

With all of that in mind, I present to you the final matchup. I will close voting when I get to 50 votes.

Thank you to everyone who voted and followed along! Leave a comment to let me know what YOUR champion was! Which matchup didn’t go the way you thought? Which musicals did better than you thought? Leave a comment below!